It'd probably look a lot like the MS Surface Pro; maybe a bit thinner because of the reduced power consumption allowing a smaller battery, maybe not because the Surface Pro had bad runtime for a tablet.Reply

I agree the Surface Pro is small enough, though the runtime is a bit short.I'd rather they move to a more power efficient processor (not necessarily 4.5W), but maintain the chassis size. They could fill in the extra space from integration (and potentially smaller heatsinks) with more batteries.Reply

Yes I agree about the short runtime on IVB Surface Pro, but this Haswell ULT/ULX part should fit the bill. If you read Anand's MBA testing, the Surface Pro really needs to get into that 10+ hour mostly idle runtime on a single charge. I think his 2013 MBA with Haswell got up to 18 hours. Regardless, you NEED to get through a full workday with your Surface Pro in various usage modes for it to become a perfect mobile work solution.Reply

If you're going to fork over >$1000 for an x86 tablet with Haswell then presumably you want to be able to harness the CPU and GPU power it offers rather than be limited by the 4.5W SDP. I'm sure the battery life would be great at idle, but if you're going to sit at idle for the overwhelming majority of the time then why not get a Bay Trail chip?

It just seems like Intel is attempting to shoehorn their big core architecture into a package that it still has trouble fitting intoReply

Yeah, there's absolutely no point for Intel to cripple its Core chips like this so they are only "slightly" better in performance than ARM chips (even 2x better is too low), while costing 10x more. OEM's don't even bother with Windows on their tablets, because the $100 license is too much and makes their sub-$500 tablets uncompetitive, and Intel thinks they will buy these chips from them to be able to make only $800+ tablets?

So far no tablet that cost more than even the big iPad has been even REMOTELY close to being as successful, and even Apple is starting to see people switch to the cheaper $330 iPad Mini - yet Intel thinks OEM's will buy chips that cost as much as the full iPad Mini tablet? Yeah, good luck with that Intel. The "good old days" of abusing your monopoly to force OEM's to buy your chips over the competitors are over.Reply

I would have liked to have seen one of these 11.5W Y series haswell cores in the recent Lenovo Yoga 11s laptop. Battery life would have been so much better than with the Y series IVB core they went for. Out of interest, Anand is the 11s interesting enough to warrant one of your reviews?Reply

A detachable keyboard is better than a backwards folding one in terms of weight and convenience. Can be an acceptable compromise if it saves some complexity in the design and manufacturing, but is definitely not ideal.

But most importantly, an active digitizer is a must for anyone that has ever tried one. Reply

Because they perform worse and use more power. Seeing as a lot of the comments you see here are people complaining that it's still too much power/not enough performance (and I agree on both fronts - i5 2Ghz equivelant performance at 2-3w is what we really want), you can see why AMD is not really in the picture at the moment. They are on the way, but simply trail Intel in every area except cost. At the moment, cost isn't the biggest issue for Core, it's power consumption, heat and performance.Reply

This is going to be so annoying. It's yet again another step for Intel in its recent crusade to mislead the public when it comes to comparing its chips against ARM chips.

How the hell are they even calculating the average? By adding 20h of idle time (close to 0W consumption), 4 hours of very low usage on-screen time, and 20 minutes of high usage? And then they get this "average" SDP number?

So what happens if instead of those 20 minutes of high usage that they calculate, I use the tablet for 3 hours continuously playing a 3D game or watching a high quality 1080p movie? Will I get 3rd degree burns on my hands?

Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but I think you understand where I'm going with this. Intel is going to be very misleading about how they calculate this "average", and it may differ a lot from how people will really use the devices with these chips inside, and real world average could be a lot higher.

The TDP is a KNOWN and good metric, because you know exactly how hot the tablet is going to get if it reaches peak performance. Intel is only messing with this to further mislead us about how good their chips are vs ARM chips. They're doing this because they're desperate and see the writing on the wall.Reply

Tried to answer my own question, since this is a "KNOWN and good metric". Found this "And then there’s the 32nm Exynos 5, based on ARM’s brand new Cortex-A15. From the get-go we’ve known that Cortex-A15 would be a monster — and indeed, it’s the first ARM chip to comfortably outperform an x86 design from Intel — but at what cost? Anand’s testing shows that the Cortex-A15 chews through power at an impressive rate, comfortably consuming more than 4 watts during load — and that’s with Samsung throttling the CPU and GPU when it hits 4W; the actual TDP allows for up to 8W." http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144778-atom-v...So, Cortex throttles to 4W, and if Intel throttles to 4.5W. Seems fairly even to me. Next question which has better performance at that wattage? Anyone got benchmarks of this? Reply

I'd like to see a fanless ultraportable laptop with Haswell.Why don't they put the cpu behind the screen so that the screen part of the laptop gets hot. That way the part that's sitting on the lap can hold the battery and stay cold.Reply

I would love one of these stuck on a Thin-ITX motherboard. Low power and the possibility of a ramp up to higher performance would be great in a silent home server, Atom is not yet 64-bit and I can only imagine this may still have a greater dynamic range for performance than new Silvermont.Reply

In terms of battery life, yes, SDP matters, because the majority of users spend most time either typing, or web browsing.In terms of how much heat your CPU or SoC produces while playing a game, watching a video, or editing photos/movies, TDP may be more important. TDP is also more important for system manufacturers.Reply

Both are important to manufacturers. TDP affects thermal design. But SDP affects battery life, and so also determines case size and battery size. Bigger batteries are heavier and more expensive.

There are a lot of factors. If the Haswell can ramp up to 11 W and get a task done in 1 second that a A15 capped at 4 W would require 3 seconds to do, then they may both use similar amounts of power, but the user experience will be that the Haswell is "snappier". So both SDP and TDP are important.Reply